This is an excerpt from the book News from Nowhere Redux: Television and the News By Edward Jay

Epstein (http://amzn.to/vHxZzm)

Selections from Reality on Television

Each weekday evening, the three major television networksthe American Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and the National Broadcasting Companyfeed filmed news stories over lines leased from the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. to the more than six hundred local stations affiliated with them, which, in turn, broadcast the stories over the public airwaves to a nationwide audience. The C.B.S. Evening News, which is broadcast by two hundred local stations, reaches some nineteen million viewers; the N.B.C. Nightly News, broadcast by two hundred and nine stations, some eighteen million viewers; and the A.B.C. Evening News, broadcast by a hundred and ninety-one stations, some fourteen million. News stories from these programs are recorded on videotape by most affiliates and used again, usually in truncated form, on local news programs late in the evening. Except for the news on the few unaffiliated stations and on the noncommercial stations, virtually all the filmed reports of national and world news seen on television are the product of the three network news organizations. The process by which news is gathered, edited, and presented to the public is more or less similar at the three networks. A limited number of subjectsusually somewhere between twenty and thirtyare selected each day as possible film stories by news executives, producers, anchor men, and assignment editors, who base their choices principally on wire-service and newspaper reports. Camera crews are dispatched to capture these events on 16-mm. color film. The filming

is supervised by either a field producer or a correspondentor, in some cases, the cameraman himself. The film is then shipped to the networks headquarters in New York or to one of its major news bureausin Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washingtonor, if time is an important consideration, processed and edited at the nearest available facilities and transmitted electronically to New York. Through editing and rearranging of the filmed scenes, a small fraction of the exposed filmusually less than ten per centis reconstructed into a story whose form is to some extent predetermined. Reuven Frank, until two months ago the president of N.B.C. News, has written: Every news story should, without any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, a middle and an end. After the addition of a sound track, recorded at the event, the story is explained and pulled together by a narration, written by the correspondent who covered the event or by a writer in the network news offices. Finally, the story is integrated into the news program by the anchor man. Network news organizations select not only the events that will be shown as national and world news on television but the way in which those events will be depicted. This necessarily involves choosing symbols that will have general meaning for a national audience. The picture is not a fact but a symbol, Reuven Frank once wrote. The real child and its real crying become symbols of all children. In the same way, a particular black may be used to symbolize the aspirations of his race, a particular student may be used to symbolize the claims of his generation, and a particular policeman may be used to symbolize the concept of authority. Whether the black chosen is a Black Panther or an integrationist, whether the student is a militant activist or a Young Republican, whether the policeman is engaged in a brutal or a benevolent act obviously affects the impression of the event received by the audience. When the same symbols are consistently used on television to depict the behavior and aspirations of groups, they become stable imageswhat Walter Lippmann, in his classic study Public Opinion, has called a repertory of stereotypes. These images obviously have great power; public-opinion polls show that television is the most believed source of news for most of the population. The director of C.B.S. News in Washington, William Small, has written about television news: When television covered its first war in Vietnam, it showed a terrible truth of war in a manner new to mass audiences. A case can be made, and certainly should be examined, that this was cardinal to the disillusionment of Americans with this war, the cynicism of many young people toward America, and the destruction of Lyndon Johnsons tenure of office. When television examined a different kind of revolution, it was singularly effective in helping bring about the Black revolution. And it would be difficult to dispute the claim of Reuven Frank that there are events which exist in the American mind and recollection primarily because they were reported on regular television news programs. How were those events selected to be shown on television, and who or what determined the way in which they were depicted? Vice-President Spiro Agnew believes the answer is that network news is shaped by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers, who have broad powers of choice and wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues in our nation. Television executives and newsmen, on the other hand, often argue that television news is shaped not by men but by eventsthat news is news.

Both of these analyses overlook the economic realities of network television, the effects of government regulation on broadcasting, and the organizational requirements of the network news operations, whose established routines and procedures tend to impose certain forms on television news stories. David Brinkley, in an N.B.C. News special entitled From Here to the Seventies, reiterated a description of television news that is frequently offered by television newsmen: What television did in the sixties was to show the American people to the American people. It did show the people places and things they had not seen before. Some they liked, and some they did not. It was not that television produced or created any of it. In this view, television news does no more than mirror reality. Thus, Leonard Goldenson, the chairman of the board of A.B.C., testified before the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that complaints of news distortion were brought about by the fact that Americans are reluctant to accept the images reflected by the mirror we have held up to our society. Robert D. Kasmire, a vicepresident of N.B.C., told the commission, There is no doubt that television is, to a large degree, a mirror of our society. It is also a mirror of public attitudes and preferences. The president of N.B.C., Julian Goodman, told the commission, In short, the medium is blamed for the message. Dr. Frank Stanton, vice-chairman and former president of C.B.S., testifying before a House committee, said, What the media do is to hold a mirror up to society and try to report it as faithfully as possible. Elmer Lower, the president of A.B.C. News, has described television news as the television mirror that reflects across oceans and mountains, and added, Let us open the doors of the parliaments everywhere to the electronic mirrors. The imagery has been picked up by critics of television, too. Jack Gould, formerly of the Times, wrote of televisions coverage of racial riots, Congress, one would hope, would not conduct an examination of a mirror because of the disquieting images that it beholds. The mirror analogy has considerable descriptive power, but it also leads to a number of serious misconceptions about the medium. The notion of a mirror of society implies that everything of significance that happens will be reflected on television news. Network news organizations, however, far from being ubiquitous and all-seeing, are limited newsgathering operations, which depend on camera crews based in only a few major cities for most of their national stories. Some network executives have advanced the idea that network news is the product of coverage by hundreds of affiliated stations, but the affiliates contribution to the network news programs actually is very small. Most network news stories are assigned in advance to network news crews and correspondents, and in many cases whether or not an event is covered depends on where it occurs and the availability of network crews. The mirror analogy also suggests immediacy: events are reflected instantaneously, as in a mirror. This notion of immediate reporting is reinforced by the way people in television news depict the process to the public. News executives sometimes say that, given the immediacy of television, the network organization has little opportunity to intervene in news decisions. Reuven Frank once declared, on a television program about television, News coverage generally happens too fast for anything like that to take place. But does it? Though it is true that elements of certain events, such as space exploration and political conventions, are broadcast live, virtually all of the regular newscasts, except for the commentators lead-ins and tags to the news stories, are prerecorded on videotape or else on film, which must be transported, processed, edited, and projected before it can be seen. Some film stories are delayed from one day to two

weeks, because of certain organizational needs and policies. Reuven Frank more or less outlined these policies on prepared, or delayed, news in a memorandum he wrote when he was executive producer of N.B.C.s nightly news program. Except for those rare days when other material becomes available, he wrote, the gap will be filled by planned and prepared film stories, and we are assuming the availability of two each night. These longer pieces, he continued, were to be planned, executed over a longer period of time than spot news, usable and relevant any time within, say, two weeks rather than that day, receptive to the more sophisticated techniques of production and editing, but journalism withal. The reason for delaying filmed stories, a network vice-president has explained, is that it gives the producer more control over his program. First, it gives the producer control of the budget, since shipping the film by plane, though it might mean a delay of a day or two, is considerably less expensive than transmitting the film electronically by satellite or A.T. & T. lines. Second, and perhaps more important, it gives the producer control over the content of the individual stories, since it affords him an opportunity to screen the film and, if necessary, re-edit it. Eliminating the delay, the same vicepresident suggested, could have the effect of reducing network news to a mere chronicler of events and forcing it out of the business of making meaningful comment. Moreover, the delay provides a reserve of stories that can be used to give the program variety and pacing. In filming delayed stories, newsmen are expected to eliminate any elements of the unexpected, so as not to destroy the illusion of immediacy. This becomes especially important when it is likely that the unusual developments will be reported in other media and thus date the story. A case in point is an N.B.C. News story about the inauguration of a high-speed train service between Montreal and Toronto. While the N.B.C. crew was filming the turbotrain during its inaugural run to Toronto, it collided withand sliced in half, as one newspaper put ita meat trailer-truck, and then suffered a complete mechanical breakdown on the return trip. Persistent performance flaws and subsequent breakdowns eventually led to a temporary suspension of the service. None of these accidents and aberrations were included in the filmed story broadcast two weeks later on the N.B.C. evening news. David Brinkley, keeping to the original story, written before the event, introduced the film by saying, The only high-speed train now running in North America has just begun in Canada. Four and a half minutes of shots of the streamlined train followed, and the narration suggested that this foreshadowed the future of transportation, since Canadas new turbo just might shake [American] lethargy in developing such trains. (The announcement of the suspension of the service, almost two weeks later, was not carried on the program.) This practice of preparing stories also has affected the coverage of more serious subjectsfor instance, many of the filmed stories about the Vietnam war were delayed for several days. It was possible to transmit war films to the United States in one day by using the satellite relay, but the cost was considerable at the height of the warmore than three thousand dollars for a ten-minute transmission, as opposed to twenty or thirty dollars for shipping the same film by plane. And, with the exception of momentous battles, such as the Tet offensive, virtually all of the network film was sent by plane. To avoid the possibility of having the delayed footage dated by newspaper accounts, network correspondents were instructed to report on the routine and continuous aspects of the war rather than unexpected developments, according to a former N.B.C. Saigon bureau manager. The mirror analogy, in addition, obscures the component of willof initiative in producing feature stories and of decisions made in advance to cover or not to cover certain types of events. A mirror makes no decisions; it simply reflects what takes place in front of it.

This chapter is excerpted from Edward Jay Epsteins book News from Nowhere Redux: Television and News, now available on Kindle (http://amzn.to/vHxZzm) ) and Kindle Apps for ipad. It is also available on Nook (http://bit.ly/rqGEaH) and the itunes store. Other books by Edward Jay Epstein can be found at: (http://amzn.to/ndfiNf)

NEWS FROM NOWHERE REDUX Television and the News By Edward Jay Epstein An EJE Ebook

Other Books By Edward Jay Epstein Inquest Legend News From Nowhere The Rise and Fall of Diamonds Agency of Fear Between Fact and Fiction The Assassination Chronicles Dossier: Armand Hammer The Big Picture The Hollywood Economist EJE Originals

Myths of the Media Armand Hammer: The Darker Side The Rockefellers The JFK Assassination Theories Garrisons Game Zias Crash Who Killed Gods Banker The Crude Cartel Killing Castro Tabloid America: Crimes of the Press The Money Demons: True Fables of Wall Street James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right

Copyright by EJE Publication 2011 All Rights Reserved ISBN 9781617040856 Parts of this book appeared in The New Yorker Cover Design By Catriona Lennox About The Author Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1973. His master's thesis at Cornell was published as Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth and became a national best seller; his doctoral dissertation at Harvard was published as News From Nowhere: The Selection of Reality on Television, and is today a standard textbook in media studies courses . He taught political science at MIT and UCLA before becoming a full time author. He lives in New York City. His website is www.edwardjayepstein.com